What did Speaker Oquaye say?
I ask this question today and attempt to answer because of a number of factors. The Right Honourable Speaker Mike Oquaye’s address was titled, ‘’August 4, Ghana’s Day of Destiny’’ and sought to provide the historical and intellectual background and foundation for the presidential intention to create a new holiday.
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Most of the intellectual and historical writing which have been produced as a result of the desire to create a Founders Day holiday out of August 4 have been characterised by plain misrepresentations and misstatements of facts and analysis of events.
This moved me to acquire the text of that address to find out if it was the source of the regrettable statements and articles made and written since then.
An instance of this grossly misconceived addition to the debate was the contribution of the well- known Accra lawyer and former deputy minister, Nkrabea Effah-Dartey, in the Daily Guide of Thursday, August 10, 2017 at page 16 and titled ‘I agree with Speaker.’’ Nkrabea boldly stated among other things that among those present at the launch of the United Gold Coast Convention [UGCC], included the ‘’good old lawyer John Mensah Sarbah’’.
He went on to further state that those who gathered at Saltpond were all self-made men and elites who could afford to travel to Europe to do their anticolonial politics. Sarbah, in 1947, had died 37 years previously in November 1910. The other statement was striking in its praise and elevation of snobbery and arrogance of wealth which we all know, are no nos in democratic politics but which I am certain, the writer thought to be a revelation of political wisdom.
In fact, it was Nkrabea whose article moved me to look for the full text of the speaker’s address which was broadcast and telecast live on some media outlets that day. Having secured it, I spent some time to digest the 78-page document. I must say at once that I was deeply saddened by the relish with which obvious misstatements of facts, leading to erroneous analysis and conclusions were bandied about in the address all to rapturous applause by the mesmerised and distinguished audience.
Now, Speaker Oquaye has a distinguished public background. In his current position, he is the third gentleman of the land after the President and Vice-President. He is a lawyer, a former diplomat, a former parliamentarian, a university professor and a Baptist clergyman. I remember that I had expressed sadness in an earlier epistle after the address, relying on press reports that he should not have agreed to deliver such a lecture with so much partisanship embedded as it would detract from his well-deserved public position in our society. Having carefully read his address, I was not far from wrong in my assessment.
The only defence available to him is that as someone who did not study history, he was dabbling in uncharted territory. He had as much as stated so in his tribute to the late Mrs Mary Adu-Boahen on November 18, 2016 that ‘’when I entered Legon in 1964, I did not offer History as one of my first year subjects. But I attended his [Prof. Adu-Boahen’s] lectures on African Studies and I found in him an intellectual par excellence.’’ This is at page 33 of the funeral brochure of Mrs Adu-Boahen.
The major thrust of the Speaker’s lecture was simple and straightforward: to raise the historical and political profile of Dr J.B. Danquah and that of former President Edward Akufo-Addo, one of the Big Six, and father of our current President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to the position of founders, whilst at the same time, heaping calumnies upon President Kwame Nkrumah. All this was woven together to present the current ruling New Patriotic Party [NPP] as the historical heirs not only of the UGCC, but of everything else which have happened in this country since 1947. To be facetious, tongue in cheek, since President Nkrumah was a bona fide UGCC member till he formed the Convention People’s Party in June 1949, why separate him from this strange interpretation?
The assertion of Speaker Oquaye that Dr Danquah was the first President of the Ghana Bar Association was not true. It was R.S. Blay. For the Gold Coast Bar, it was Francis Dove a native of Sierra Leone whose daughter Mabel was actually the first wife of Dr Danquah. The assertion that late President Akufo-Addo produced the Constitution of the Second Republic from a UGCC blueprint is ridiculous because he chaired a committee of eminent Ghanaians at the time.
The reasons related by Speaker Oquaye for the choice of Saltpond for the launching of the UGCC are at best, fanciful. The principal reason was because Cape Coast, the natural choice, was hosting that day the 50th anniversary of the moribund Aborigines Rights Protection Society [ARPS] which had Kobina Sekyi as the leading light. That fact alone should inform anyone that no linear logical progression in the anticolonial struggle existed between the ARPS and the UGCC.
No evidence is provided for the weird assertion that the ex-servicemens’ march on the Osu Castle on February 28, 1948 was instigated by the UGCC because no such evidence exists. Danquah could not have seconded the motion for independence on the night of March 5, 1957 for the simple reason he was not a parliamentarian. If Nkrumah had collapsed and died in Parliament after moving the motion on March 5, 1957, who would have been responsible for the events that led to independence on March 6, 1957?
The American example compared to the Ghanaian independence fight is instructive. Professor Oquaye noted that the American Constitution only came into being in 1787, 21 years after independence was declared in 1776. This is the kernel of the confusion and the intellectual mischief: there is needless and purposeless conflation and forced marriage of the idea of independence with the quality of government which an independent country would have to fashion for itself.
Nowhere in politics, history or any other field of knowledge can it be claimed that independence is inextricably linked to the type of government which should emerge in freedom. Constitution-making is not independence. It is at best a gradualist approach to the issue of complete freedom, hence the slogan, ‘’independence in the shortest possible time’’, which is something a typical unhurried lawyer will champion.
The choice of the name Ghana as the ancestral home of present-day Ghanaians has been since debunked conclusively by professional historians. Nkrumah’s adoption of the name only proves his strong UGCC roots, not the intellectual sagacity of Danquah. The same goes for the choice of March 6. Victor Owusu and Joe Appiah first entered Parliament in 1956, not 1954, as the address stated. It was after the 1954 elections that Owusu, Appiah, R.R. Amponsah, Kuranchie-Taylor and others left the CPP to join the National Liberation Movement [NLM] of Baffour Akoto, and got elected for the first time into Parliament in 1956.
It was the late Speaker Peter Ala Adjetey who led the NPP legal team in the December 31 holiday case not President Akufo-Addo. And the latter went to court to challenge, unsuccessfully the results of the 2012 poll not the 2008 one. Many such terminological inexactitudes muddy the flawed analysis in this important address.Speaker Oquaye should not have accepted to lead the debate to create a Founders Day with this unhistorical piece.
Writer’s E-mail: [email protected]